SPOTLIGHTS:

Peter Kiesel in the news

6 items

For Compactness and Ruggedness, Linear Variable Filters Fit the BillInnovations in design and scalable manufacturing have led to the development of linear variable filters that cover a broader wavelength range than ever before9 September 2016 | Photonics.com (Photonics Spectra) by Trey Turner, Eric Baltz and Roger Kirschner, Research Electro-Optics, Inc.

Peter Kiesel, principal scientist at Palo Alto Research Center Inc. (PARC), a Xerox company, has invented a technology that can measure wavelength variations with sub-picometer resolution. It combines photodetector position sensors with a linear variable bandpass filter that converts spectral wavelength into an intensity distribution on the position sensor. A centroid calculation of the intensity distribution provides the very accurate wavelength information.

Under the ARPA-E Advanced Management and Protection of Energy-Storage Devices (AMPED) program for advanced battery management systems, PARC, a Xerox company, and LG Chem Power (LGCPI) are developing SENSOR (Smart Embedded Network of Sensors with an Optical Readout), an optically based smart monitoring system prototype for battery packs. The system will use fiber optic sensors embedded inside Lithium-ion battery cells to measure parameters indicative of cell state online, such as state-of-charge (SOC) and state-of-health (SOH).

The team has already presented exciting results achieved over the project's first half focused on cell-level state features detectable, initial SOX algorithm development, low-cost optical readout development, and early validation test results at SPIE DSS 2015 and elsewhere.

Lithium-ion batteries, which power computers and electric vehicles, are too heavy, expensive, and wasteful. That's a particularly big problem when it comes to packing many batteries into something small like a car. The units are pressed together, cell by cell, which makes individual components difficult to monitor and manage...

PARC is embedding fiber optic sensors into batteries to measure their temperatures and the strains that come as they expand and contract during use.

"The Department of Energy today announced that 19 transformative new projects will receive a total of $43 million in funding from the Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to leverage the nation’s brightest scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs to develop breakthrough energy storage technologies and support promising small businesses..." [download full list]

Advanced Management And Protection Of Energy-Storage Devices (AMPED)

Lead organization: PARC

Description: Smart Embedded Network of Sensors with Optical Readout (SENSOR). Palo Alto Research Center will develop new fiber optic sensors that are inserted into battery packs to monitor and measure batteries during charge and discharge cycles. These compact fiber optical sensors will measure the battery’s health while in use to avoid degradation and failure.

"The US Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) has selected 19 new projects to receive a total of $43 million to develop breakthrough energy storage technologies and support promising small businesses...

Unlike other Department of Energy efforts to push the frontiers of battery chemistry, AMPED is focused on maximizing the potential of existing battery chemistries. These innovations are intended to help reduce costs and improve the performance of next generation storage technologies, which could be applied in both plug-in electric and hybrid-electric vehicles."

Researchers at PARC "have shrunk the laser technology inside large laboratory machines down to about the size of an iPod. Their cheap, handheld device promises to provide an immune system check-up on the spot and in less than 10 minutes. The technology analyzes a small sample of blood drawn by a finger prick. 'The quality of their test is great,' said researcher Bernhard Weigl of PATH, a non-profit reviewing a variety of CD4 testing technologies. 'If you look at their graph, it pretty much looked like the graph you would get from a big instrument.' PARC's prototype cost about $250 to build, a hundred times cheaper than the large flow cytometers currently in use."